The Penny Is Dead, But Precision Isn't
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Next time you're at a gas station, look up at the sign. The price isn't $2.43 a gallon. It's $2.42 and nine-tenths of a cent. That trailing 9/10 has been sitting on a forty-foot sign your entire life, charging you a fraction of a penny in public, and you've probably never given it a second thought.
Hold that image, because on November 12, 2025, the U.S. Treasurer struck the last circulating penny at the Mint's Philadelphia facility. Two hundred and thirty-two years of production, ended with a little ceremony and a photo op. The official reason is hard to argue with: a penny costs 3.69 cents to make, and killing it saves the Mint about $56 million a year. By the numbers, it's the obvious call.
I'm going to mourn it anyway.
Not because the penny was good money. It wasn't. It was a coin you couldn't actually spend one at a time, that piled up in jars and cup holders and the little dish by the register. But the penny was the last honest unit of physical cash we had. It was the smallest piece of value you could hold in your hand, hand to someone else, and have the whole transaction be over and done with the moment it changed hands. No record. No account. No middleman taking a cut or keeping a log. Losing it bothers me more than the accountants think it should, and I want to explain why. The gas sign is where the explanation starts.
We have always paid in fractions of a cent
That 9/10 didn't start as a marketing gimmick, though it certainly became one. When the Revenue Act of 1932 created the first federal gas tax at a penny a gallon, gas cost about 20 cents. A full cent was a 5% price increase overnight. Station owners didn't want to eat it and didn't want to raise prices by a whole penny, so they split the difference in tenths and passed along part of the tax. Later, when the interstates went in, somebody noticed that $2.42-and-change reads as "two forty-two" to a driver at 70 miles an hour. The illusion stuck. It's the same trick as $1.99, just with an extra decimal.
But the legal basis goes back much further. The Coinage Act of 1792 made it legal to price things to one-thousandth of a dollar, a unit called a mill. We never minted a mill coin, but we've been pricing in mills for over two centuries. If you own property in most counties in this country, your tax bill is calculated on a millage rate, which is literally dollars per thousand. Your power bill is quoted in fractions of a cent per kilowatt-hour. Stock issuances do it. Interest calculations do it.
So the sub-penny is not some crypto novelty. It is the oldest pricing convention in American commerce. We have simply never let you hold one.
The same week, in crypto, the opposite happened
Here's the part that's been rattling around in my head. The same week we decided a hundredth of a dollar was too small and too expensive to bother tracking in your pocket, I could have opened a wallet and sent someone USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, denominated down to one ten-thousandth of a single cent. USDC carries six decimal places. Its smallest unit is $0.000001.
Nobody put six decimals in USDC as a joke. Circle did it because at scale, in lending, in payments, in currency conversion, in machine-to-machine transactions that fire a million times an hour, that fraction is money. It's real. It matters enough to engineer for. Which is exactly what the gas station figured out in 1932 and what your county tax assessor has known forever: the fraction of a cent is meaningful wherever it accumulates.
So precision didn't get harder. Computers are very good at small numbers and they got cheaper at it every year. Precision got removed from one specific place. The place where it was private.
Killing the penny is a bet against the dollar
Here's the part I find most telling, and nobody in the coverage said it out loud.
Think about what it means to retire your smallest denomination. You only do that if you're confident you will never need it again. And you'd only be confident of that if you believe prices are going up forever, permanently, with no scenario where the dollar buys more tomorrow than it does today. A stronger dollar means lower prices, and lower prices make small units more useful, not less. Try the exercise yourself: name the future in which we bring the penny back. Deflation? A dollar that gains ground for a decade? You can't name one, and neither can Treasury. That's what the decision actually says.
We've done this before, and the precedent is worse than people realize. The Coinage Act of 1857 killed the half cent for being too small to bother with. At the moment they retired it, a half cent was worth about 15 cents in today's money. More purchasing power than a modern dime. They didn't kill a worthless coin. They killed a genuinely useful one, because inflation had already made it annoying and they knew which direction things were headed. They were right. That's the depressing part.
And...